Not to mention, very few people want to eat a meal every 2 hours (150 miles / 75 mph).
Who can average 75 mph for two hours? Where you driving, Nebraska? I was thinking of more like 3 hours, 180 miles @ 60 mph. Breakfast at about 8 or 9 AM, stop about noon to eat lunch. At 3 or 4 PM stop for ice cream, a coffee and a donut, or other kind of snack. Then stop for supper about 6 or 7 PM. If this isn't the destination and one is willing then this can mean another couple hours before stopping to find a place to sleep for the night to repeat same the next day.
Watching a sitcom on a streaming service during charging breaks would become a thing (Netflix & Charge?).
If the charging station has a nice lounge and a solid WiFi system then this might be something people actually do. If they have to sit in their car and use up precious cell phone data then not so much.
A better solution which only works if people could be trusted around high voltages - overhead lines over one roadway lane, and a pantograph to reach it, so you can drive and charge (sortof like trackless trolleys). Just remember to drop the pan before exiting the lane.
How well will that work at 75 mph on an interstate through Nebraska? I can't imagine anyone slowing down for that unless they really really have to, they are driving through Nebraska you know. Then again, if it saves them from actually having to stop in Nebraska, then I could see that.
As an undergrad I also knew someone that made fake IDs. Very convincing ones too, especially since the guy had got his hands on the state ID laminates with the watermark on them. I recall he said that he bought them off someone that stole them from a DMV office. I didn't want to ask any questions, the less I knew the better. He said he'd make me one with the clear laminate for free but if I wanted the laminate with the state watermark that I'd have to pay for that. Most people don't think to look for the watermark, or so he claimed.
He was smart enough to keep this to word of mouth, especially since he knew he had a limited number of laminates to sell.
Debi: [about the man Martin killed at the reunion] He was trying to kill you, right?
Marty: Yes.
Debi: It wasn't the other way around?
Marty: No.
Debi: Is it something you've done?
Marty: It's something I do... professionally, for about five years now.
[He lifts the gun in his hand]
Debi: [Gasps] You were joking! People joke about the horrible things they *don't* do, they don't *do* them! It's absurd!
Marty: When I left, I joined the Army, and when I took the service exam, my psych profile fit a certain... "moral flexibility" would be the only way to describe it. I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program and we sort of found each other. That's the way it works.
Debi: So, you're a government spook?
Marty: Yes, I mean no. I was before but I'm not now... but that' all irrelevant, really. The idea of government, nations is public relations theory at this point.
Debi: Don't. I don't wanna hear about the theories. I wanna hear about the dead people. Explain the dead people.
I remember talking to my dad about one of his card playing buddies. I think it was about me overhearing them talking about him going to college. I asked what was his major, Dad said the guy just went to school to play baseball.
A lot of these student athletes don't think much about what they are going to do after college. They'll study just about anything so they can say they went to college. They go to school so that they can play sports and hope some professional team picks them up, or just to live the high school jock life for 2 or 4 years longer.
If they graduate then at least they can check that box on a job application saying they went to college, even if what they will be doing is answering phones and telling people that call to reboot their modem. Which will be especially odd if they end up working at an ice cream parlor.
It's not like the classes jocks take are difficult either.
Bet he was a communications major.
The article did state that grades were changed in business, engineering and chemistry classes. There may have been grades changed in Earth Science 101: "Rocks for Jocks" too. It sounds like he was selling his services to other students, which is just asking to get caught.
Changing grades on the computer is just stupid, IMHO, since it's not like the instructors don't keep paper records. Had he stuck to copying exams and answer keys then he might have gotten away with it, at least long enough to graduate. Or at least add enough doubt as to who did what when that no one would call the FBI on him. But then people that resort to cheating on exams aren't typically that bright.
What I have to ponder is why the FBI was involved. This was a state facility, not a federal one. Doesn't every state have their own investigation service? As a state university they'll have their own police force, with a direct line to said state investigation office. What federal law was broken? Not that this seems to matter any more, I remember an assault case that made national news. The FBI got involved for some reason. When asked why the FBI was there the answer floored me, the scissors used to cut the victim's hair came from out of state so this was an investigation of "interstate commerce" as defined in the US Constitution. If that's the bar that has to be hurdled then everything is a federal case. Some kid steals a candy bar and the FBI is there because he was wearing shoes made in China.
The university told the FBI that the cheating scheme cost the school $68,000 to investigate the breach and to beef up its IT security.
Maybe they should have thought about IT security from the start.
I've been to college and I see how "security" is done. The computers the instructors use are just put on a desk or table in the front of the room. To keep it from walking away there will be a flimsy cable attaching the parts to the desk or wall. Even basic security, like setting BIOS passwords, will not be done. This can allow spying on the computer with software keyloggers and such, or simply vandalizing it so it's unbootable. The installation of a hardware keylogger, like in this example, takes no real skill.
Newer classrooms will have a proper podium designed to hold a computer. The computer will still just be out in the open for someone to mess with, and being in a podium will make things like a hardware keylogger more difficult to see.
Had the school thought of security from the start then this would not have happened and the costs would have been minimal. For example, when installing the podium use one with a locking door to the space for the computer. This would make installing a keylogger, hardware or software, much more difficult. It would also add some inconvenience for the IT support and the instructors, which is likely why it wasn't considered until something like this happened.
There's a lot of simple things that should have been done on just getting basic physical security on the computers. From what I know the network and software is pretty secure. The software people on universities love to play with this and it costs next to nothing to implement since graduate students' time is effectively free.
Assuming that these computers have some basic physical security, and pretty solid software security, that doesn't stop things like a student sneaking into a classroom early in the morning, before classes start for the day, and putting a cheap cell phone in the ceiling tile so the camera looks down on the keyboard through a small hole, and recording keystrokes.
What I think will solve this problem is the inevitable march of technology. I suspect that computers will get small and powerful enough that instructors will simply bring their computer with them to the classroom. There will be nothing in the room to mess with that would allow keyloggers or whatever. Access to computers in public spaces like labs, libraries, and so forth will be require an actual thought on security instead of technology fixing it for them. I'd think that there's lots of ways that could fix this where graduate students could do some research and development on this, which doesn't require any hardware, and they get to write a paper on it for a grade.
At the start they need basic physical security. They failed on this, and when someone took advantage of this they claim this wasn't the school's fault. No, it was the school's fault. If you own a house but don't lock the door when you leave then don't be surprised if someone walks in to walk off with your spare change jar and the beer in your fridge. Punish the trespasser but own up to leaving the door unlocked.
At highway/motorway speeds, every 150 miles you should take AT LEAST a 20 minute break. That means 450mph recharge is more than enough.
I agree. There's a problem with that though. If I'm on a trip with an EV then I'm stuck watching the car charge for 20 minutes. Unless the place I stop also has a place to eat, and food I'd actually want to eat, then I'm watching the car and then going further down the road to eat.
If I have a gasoline car then I'm filling up in a few minutes and gone to find somewhere to eat. If I have a hybrid then I'm filled up in no time and I still have something that will charge up overnight for my daily commute. If I have a natural gas car then I can fill up at home overnight, and I can still fill up in minutes while on long trips.
If I'm traveling with someone then I can stop every 100 to 200 miles to switch drivers, top off the tank, take a piss, and grab some food to eat on the way. That's just a few minutes, not 20, and no one is driving tired. Can't do that with an electric.
People tend to buy what they need for all occasions. They need something that can be a daily commuter and also be able to take the kids to go visit Grandma once a month or so. When there is a married couple with small children they are not going to want to stop for 20 minutes to recharge the car. They are going to stop, top off the tank, and switch drivers if one is tired. Can't do that with an electric. Maybe they'll have a hybrid so at least the commutes are electric only. Maybe they have two vehicles where during the week he drives the sedan and she drives the minivan, on long trips everyone piles in the one that burns hydrocarbons.
Electric cars have a LONG way to go before they can replace hydrocarbon burning vehicles.
You clearly seem to only want to talk about long trips rather than your everyday life.
No, I was talking about getting the advantage of filling up at home overnight for a daily commute AND still getting the ability to get a quick fill up on long trips. I can do that with natural gas and not have to bother with the complexity and cost of an electric hybrid. If for some reason a person is unable to get natural gas at home, such as people that live outside city limits, they can get an electric hybrid which has the electric range for the daily commute and still have the ability for fast refill on long trips.
There's a reason why, for example, that European commercial drivers are legally required to have at least 45 minutes of breaks for every 4 1/2 hours of driving (split up as they choose) and can lose their license if they don't: it's not safe to drive all day with no or minimal stops.
I'm not a commercial driver. Even then when I go on long trips I tend to not do so alone. We'll switch out drivers so no one is driving tired.
Are you under the mistaken impression that most people with solar installs are off-grid?
No, I was under the assumption that solar energy was supposed to be a major contributor to the electrical grid, as so many people keep telling me is "inevitable". If we assume that 1/3rd of our electricity is from solar, and electric cars are the norm, then we are going to see grid scale batteries being used to charge electric car batteries every night. That's a lot of batteries.
Grid demand is highest during the day, lower at night. If you're providing excess power during the day and consuming more than usual at night, you're helping the grid.
That helps until the wind doesn't blow, since we're having 1/3rd of our electricity from wind power now. This might help the grid but it's not helping the environment. Solar and wind need batteries, adding batteries means adding to the carbon footprint. If we want "green" electric vehicles then we need nuclear power. If you think nuclear power is going to be used to charge up these electric cars at night then perhaps we can agree on more things than we disagree. Lacking nuclear power we see that battery electric vehicles are not any more "green" than using fossil fuels.
It's not. Power plants burn natural gas over twice as efficiently as a NG car (transmission / distribution / battery / motor losses are each minimal), emit much less per unit power, and buy the gas for a lot cheaper than you do at home. Natural gas also is a minority of your power generation (a large minority, but still a minority).
That's assuming that the natural gas is being burned in combined cycle plants. If natural gas is the back up for wind and solar then it will be burned in turbines, which get 1/2 to 1/3 the efficiency of the combined cycle plants. In other words, in the ballpark of how much natural gas would be burned in the NG car compared to having to charge up a BEV car from those backup natural gas plants.
The resources needed to build all these batteries means a HUGE carbon footprint. This is often overlooked on claims of solar power being green. When the claims of solar energy being unreliable is brought up the solution is always batteries but the carbon footprint those batteries have is not added in. Battery backed solar has a carbon footprint no better than natural gas. With natural gas cars we can have slow over night "chargers" at home, and quick fill "chargers" on long trips. The carbon footprint of these natural gas cars is half that of a gasoline burner (some claim as low as 20%), or about the same as a solar powered BEV.
Welcome to late 2017, where global fast charging networks are a thing.
They will never be as fast as fueling from natural gas, gasoline, or diesel fuel. You can make your claims on how this is irrelevant all you like but reality tells me that this is important to people.
I, for one, am not that thrilled with the notion that the Saudi Kingdom is building reactors in the middle east and we are politically hamstrung against advancing the technology here in the U.S. Saudi Arabia may have the outward appearance of stability, but they're not as far removed from constant conflict as it seems.
That list of wars on Wikipedia includes many before the modern nation of Saudi Arabia even existed. I'd think that anything that predates WWII is far enough in the past that it has little relevance on today's political climate. I know that the echoes of the era before 1930 or 1950 influence what happens today but the people fighting before then are dead or senile now. The wars after that were mostly of the kingdom defending itself from outside aggressors. Again, not completely true but for the most part the nation itself is quite peaceful and prosperous.
They are peaceful and prosperous enough that they can expend the resources needed to plan for a future where the oil that they've been using to prop up their economy might not be there any more. They are now working on a transition. They had roughly a century of living off of the fruits of their oil resources. They'll likely enjoy another century of transition until the oil income is so low, and income from other sources so great, that there is not going to be fights over oil any more. There will still be wars, no doubt of that, but future wars are much less likely to be over oil.
Combining the likelihood of improved techniques for recovery with inevitable leaps in the efficiency of the relatively nascent battery technology seems to suggest that current mineral scarcities will be overcome.
I doubt that there will be any more "leaps" in battery technology. We'll probably make them safer and cheaper but I have my doubts on making them carry more energy per weight and volume. We might see energy density double, maybe even get to be as high as ten times what we have now. To get beyond that the battery will need resources outside of the battery for the chemistry, an "air breathing" system or something. Having a battery that requires external resources for the chemistry adds complexity, like the air filters we have on current gasoline burning cars to keep out road dust, and is also pushing the definition of "battery". Needing the fuel and oxidizer in a sealed container puts a hard limit on the chemical energy it can store in a given mass and volume. Extending this energy density with external resources means that any convenience for not having to add fuel to the vehicle is now lost, no more driving past filling stations.
We're going to hit a hard limit on battery energy density real soon now, assuming we haven't hit it already.
What is a nascent technology is nuclear energy. We can squeeze a lot out of that yet once people get motivated to do so. I have to wonder if the kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a plan to continue in the energy business, past the days of oil. I believe it would be very wise for them to plan on making nuclear energy research part of the plan for their future.
When people think that getting 400 miles of range from a vehicle after one hour of charging, and consider this an "improvement", have a mental block on reality. I can "charge" my Ford truck in 5 minutes, and get about 350 miles from that. Places to "charge" are easily found, I drive past probably a dozen of them on my daily commute.
Yes, they take an evening to charge at home, but what does that matter? You take ten seconds to plug in, and then you don't think any more about it; your car is full the next morning.
While last shopping for a vehicle, before ending up with my little SUV, I looked at a natural gas car. They too "charge up" at home overnight. They also take ten seconds to plug in. Where it matters though is that I'd be tied to the range of my car on a single "charge" unless I can find a place to fill up. At least with a natural gas car it too can fill up in five minutes when using the high capacity natural gas filling stations, home service lines for natural gas aren't made for filling cars.
With so much of our electricity from natural gas it seems logical to me to spend the money on getting the best of both worlds from natural gas. If electricity in an area comes from wind, water, or nuclear then maybe a natural gas EV hybrid makes sense. I saw an article recently on battery backed solar and we'd be better off with natural gas as far as CO2 output goes. That and we'd avoid solar energy's sky high electricity prices, and the massive resources needed to build all those collectors and batteries.
Solar charging of electric cars is just plain stupid. People tend to park their cars at night and drive when the sun shines. To accommodate this means charging up a battery during the day and then using this battery at night to charge the battery in the car. If we do something like a battery swap deal then this isn't a simple process of just plugging in your car at home, it's a process of lifting a massive battery from your car at a facility made for such a things, kind of like a filling station. It's because of all this battery production that the CO2 output goes up for battery backed solar. At least with wind backed up with batteries we get some energy day and night, and not just a 6 hour window to gather energy and a peak right when people take a break for lunch.
Elon Musk is a very smart person, and I can only assume he knows what many others do about the viability of electric cars and solar power. I just have to wonder what is his angle on this. I have to guess he's using the money and research from Tesla and SolarCity to get to space, where solar power makes a bit more sense. I doubt he's going to admit to this nonsense publicly, at least not until called out in a way that's undeniable. By that point SpaceX is likely to be successful enough that he won't mind so much to admit to any failure on batteries and electric cars.
She wants a new iPhone, knows nothing about it, but is a Silicon Valley engineer?
You apparently haven't met many engineers. I have. Engineers got where they are by expending a lot of mental energy on a narrow band of knowledge. I've met a lot of electrical and computer engineers that cannot be bothered to learn what I would consider very basic things on how the computers they use every day actually work. Many of these "power users" will have very powerful Linux workstations on their desk but when they go home to surf the web they'll do it on a ten year old Windows computer, an iPad, or avoid computers and simply open a beer and watch football on TV.
What I do means I have to live part of my life in the world of engineers and part in the IT world. I will find myself baffled at the ignorance of an engineer about the computers they use everyday, and at the ignorance of IT staff on how the computers they support work, only to snap out of it and realize that they don't know this stuff because they don't have to.
Engineers will buy into the brand recognition like anyone else. This might be cell phones, cars, sportball teams, clothes, or whatever else they think might matter with their friends.
I also believe that we will not run out of oil any time soon. One reason to believe this is because we are seeing more efficient uses of it worldwide. One example is not burning it for electricity when there are other sources of energy far more suited for it, saving the oil for transportation. Saudi Arabia has learned this. https://www.yahoo.com/news/sau...
Saudi Arabia plans on building more than 17 GW of nuclear energy capacity by 2032. That's roughly 100 MW of nuclear power capacity built per month for a nation, from a nation with roughly 1/10th the population and economic output of the USA. For the USA to do this means 1 GW of nuclear power capacity built per month. If they can do that then we can do that.
The interesting thing about that 1 GW per month calculation is that this is also about the same electrical capacity we'd need to add to keep up with planned closures of current nuclear and coal power plants. That's not adding capacity, that's just (barely) keeping even.
Natural gas is cheap now, which is the primary source of added electrical capacity now in the USA. What happens when natural gas isn't so cheap any more? Are we going to start building nuclear power plants like Saudi Arabia?
I know someone is ready to come back with a reply that we can go to wind and solar for our electricity, and that we can use batteries to make these unreliable energy sources reliable. Then we just get back to the problem pointed out in the article, a shortage of materials for making batteries. What happens when batteries start to get expensive? Are we going to go to nuclear power then?
What materials do we need to build a nuclear power plant? Just about the same materials for coal or natural gas, or about 1/10 the materials needed for the same capacity of wind or solar. If we have the material to build enough wind and solar to meet future energy needs then we have enough material to meet our future energy needs 10 times over with nuclear power.
America won't run out of coal, oil, or natural gas because we will have moved a large part of our energy production to nuclear long before we run out of them. If we don't move to nuclear power then we will be buying oil from a nuclear powered Saudi Arabia, which is just saying we'll be using Saudi Arabian nuclear power to power the American economy. Of all the places on Earth to build solar power I'd think Saudi Arabia would be very high on that list. I'm sure they have been and still will use solar power, but they are jumping in big on nuclear power now. That should be a clue for Americans that think we should avoid nuclear power here.
I suspect at some point we will have hydrogen fuel cells.
What? We already have them. Oh, you mean in cars. That's not happening. Hydrogen is very difficult to store and transport, unless bound chemically to something else. I'll get back to that.
The storage of the hydrogen is likely to be the killer app for carbon nanotech, as we don't want to substitute one waste of metals for another.
The best way we have to store hydrogen now is when bound to something else. Water works well to "store" hydrogen, as in being bound to an oxygen, but that's not much for a fuel. Binding hydrogen to a nitrogen or carbon works well as a fuel though. There's a reason why there is so much research into fuel cells that can run on methane and methanol, it's easier to solve the problem of extracting the hydrogen from these chemicals than to store pure hydrogen. The great thing about storing hydrogen by binding it to a carbon, we've been using hydrogen bound to carbon as fuel for a very long time. If we can make hydrogen cheap enough to use as a fuel then we can bind it to carbon and use it immediately as a fuel, no fuel cells needed.
The hydrogen can be generated in situ at home or the filling station with wind or solar power, so no dangerous tanks like with gasoline.
If you think that handling hydrogen is easier and safer than handling gasoline then I'm staying very far away from you. The hydrogen tanks will not be eliminated, the car has one. The car will need one if the fuel cells are going to propel the car.
Also, if you think that wind and solar is going to work for filling up a car for a daily driver then I suggest you check your math. Someone did do the math and it's not an easy problem to solve. http://withouthotair.com/
What? We do just fine at recycling. Imagine this, you have two piles, a pile of old lead-acid batteries and a pile of high grade lead ore. If it takes $1000 to get the lead out of the ore and $2000 to get the lead out of the batteries then where is the incentive to recycle the batteries? I'm assuming the batteries are in a place, jut like the ore, where neither pose health risks to the public where there would need to be anything expended to mitigate things like ground water contamination.
I could argue that the USA recycles far more than makes sense. I had a chemistry professor that in one lecture told the class how recycling plastics was a terrible idea. His argument was that we had a perfectly functional waste burning power plant not far from campus that could burn the plastic for energy rather than ship the plastic to some far off place to try to melt it down into something useful again. Just go make more plastic if we need more plastic, we know how to do that chemistry very well.
Recycling most metals makes perfect sense, that's something that is easy to recycle. Recycling paper and plastics are a bad idea, just burn them for their energy content and go get more. Between those two extremes are things like concrete where sometimes recycling makes sense, sometimes not, or recycling options are limited. Iron and aluminum can almost always be recycled from a high quality product into another high quality product. Concrete, even in the highest quality, is not likely to be recycled into another high quality product. Recycling might mean putting that high quality concrete (such as from a building) in a lower quality product (such as aggregate for a road). Recycling again might mean using it for the road bed, after that it's probably only good for landfill.
High quality paper (books and office paper) might be recycled into a lower quality paper (newsprint), and maybe again into a lower quality paper (insulation), and after that it's only good for burning or burying. I have to wonder if paper recycling makes sense at all after taking a tour of a paper recycling plant. The guy giving the tour mentioned the difficulty in separating the paper from all the junk that comes with it. He didn't say it outright but I got the impression that it was something they did only because if they did not they'd have people with torches and pitchforks outside chanting, "Reduce! Recycle! Reuse!"
I've learned that we are not only very good at recycling but we recycle more than we should. Dump the stuff in a landfill, if it makes sense to recycle it then we know where to find it.
Oh, one last thing. I was helping my brother with a plumbing project (he was a plumber and I was a college student on break in need of cash) and when we were done we had more than 200 pounds of cast iron pipe that we tore out of the house we worked on. I called a local recycle center on what they'd pay us for it. After I got off the phone my brother said we were taking the iron to the land fill. Even taking in the landfill fees into account it cost us less to landfill the pipe than to drive the iron to get recycled. If you think that iron needs to be recycled then I'll you where to find it.
Is the problem helped by using higher grade HDMI cables?
That's possible. It's been a while since I looked into this so my memory is foggy. The problem may have been in the converter box and/or a poor connection between the box and cable from not being seated correctly or differing opinions on the HDMI plug and port specifications. It's pretty common now to need a DisplayPort, DVI, or USB converter box to get HDMI any more. These boxes are often plastic, which won't contain RFI like the metal case of a laptop.
I hate these converter boxes, they cost just as much as a conversion cable (and then still requires a cable), they add a lump in the middle of the cord, and just generally add clutter. I wasn't the one with purchase authority, and no one thought to ask me what I thought would have been a better use of resources before buying them. I think a converter cable, rather than a converter box and cable, could have solved the problem. Partly because the conversion is done much closer to the HDMI destination (meaning much less length of cable carrying the HDMI signal and it is further from the computer), the cable avoids the need of a break in the wire (as the additional connector in the middle of the chain can be a leakage point), and again just better shielding along the entire path.
You've never seen the back of a receiver or TV in the past... what, fifteen years, and went straight from red/white analog cables to an hdmi receiver?
I've seen the back of a lot of stereo receivers, TV sets, and other home theater electronics, in the last 15 years or so and none had an optical audio input, at least none that I can recall. I've seen outputs, lots of outputs. I just saw no inputs. I've also noticed a lot of copper digital audio outputs but rarely an input to go with. What was maddening was to see a copper input and an optical output when hooking up an A/V system. I would have liked to use the digital link but I wasn't about to bother with some adapter when the analog lines worked.
Maybe I did blink and miss the whole thing. If I go looking now will I find optical inputs or has everyone moved on to HDMI audio now?
Because the brain dead HDMI spec likes to shit all over the Wi-Fi bands. They picked the "perfect" combination of leaky signal lines and clock rates to create RF noise that lands in the two primary ISM bands for WiFi. You might think this would not affect you since you run no HDMI lines to the TV but these TVs fitted out with integrated streaming boxes like to run HDMI internally. It's quite likely, even on a TV that one would think was tested against such things, will have certain screen resolutions that will jam it's own WiFi.
I heard people complain of WiFi failing on laptops when connected to some displays and only some of the time. It took some research to find out that the harmonics from HDMI would sit inside the WiFi bands. If you hit the right combination of variables then WiFi fails.
So, it looks like people get to choose, HDMI or WiFi, because it's unlikely you can have both.
I don't know if HDMI likes to shit on Bluetooth too but I would not be surprised if it did since it shares frequencies with WiFi.
That's just my theory, and I haven't tested the theory much yet, so I won't be terribly upset if someone can show I'm full of it.
Right so how does one use HDMI for my audio given the video signal never actually leaves the TV? I don't think the TV even has an HDMI out because why would it?
As sibling post point out the audio output from HDMI is on one of the HDMI inputs, called the Audio Return Channel (or ARC) input. This allows a stereo receiver, sound bar, or whatever, to get the audio from the HMDI on what appears to be only a one-way input port.
Why would anyone need HDMI for audio? Consider your setup, a feature filled TV with tuner and streaming device built in. Now imaging adding a stereo receiver that provides switching between audio/video sources like a DVD player, satellite box, and game console. The stereo would strip out the audio from the HDMI for the other A/V sources but if you want to hear the TV through the stereo speakers then the audio is sent out to the stereo through the HDMI/ARC "input" port. This means not having to run two cables (one for A/V input and another for audio only output) between the stereo and TV.
Oh and a 2 metre Toshlink cable on eBay can be had for less than the price of a coffee.
Yes, Toslink cables are cheap but then so are HDMI cables. I did a quick look on the internet and I see Toslink and HDMI cables both for $8 or so. I don't know what you pay for a coffee so maybe the Toslink is indeed cheaper than HDMI, but it seems only marginally so. One thing though, if you've already run the HDMI to get video in then you can save enough for another cup of coffee by not needing the Toslink for audio by using HDMI/ARC.
HDMI also has an Ethernet channel to get a network between devices, for things like sharing an internet link with a game console. HDMI carries some power too, not much perhaps. The power it provides is 0.25W, 4.5W, or 7.5W depending on the standards the device supports on a given HDMI port. Even if you don't use the video over the HDMI cable, or the power, or Ethernet, the combination of ARC and CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) means even a simple soundbar has not just audio from the TV but also control signals.
You said the TV is made by LG, it likely has has CEC but they call it SimpLink. If you see SimpLink written on the TV, in the manual, or on the TV menus, then it can very likely send and receive CEC on any HDMI "input".
I've had probably a dozen devices with an optical output, laptops, CD players, DVD players, music streaming boxes, and I'm probably forgetting something. What was rare was anything with an optical audio input, or it seems that way to me. The only thing I can recall having an optical input was this fancy (for the time) SoundBlaster card I bought as part of a computer system from my brother.
I've also had a lot of things with S/PDIF copper inputs and outputs but I don't recall ever having a situation where I actually used them. Most cases for using audio cables from a device to another is connecting an audio source directly to an amplifier. I've had hi-fi stereo systems in the past but the lack of anything with digital inputs meant all those things with digital outputs would be connected with the analog outputs to the pre-amp.
I guess I would have used the optical cables if there were more products that had optical inputs. I suppose I didn't really look all that hard for them but then if all these devices had optical outputs then someone was using them, right? No one I knew used them, but then that's not something that comes up in conversation often.
Now we have digital audio over HDMI, USB, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and more. These cables do more than carry audio too, such as video, power, and remote control signals. I liked the idea of optical audio because it gives a digital signal and keeps electrical isolation, but it never seemed to get off the ground for me.
Optical audio only seems to come up for me when I have a poorly configured Linux audio driver that turns on an optical output, I notice a red dot on a wall, and it takes a minute to realize where it's coming from. I then think for a second on how it might be nice to use that digital audio for something, and then remember I don't have anything with an optical input, and forget about it again.
Is optical audio dying? I have to ask, was it ever alive?
Battle simulations and collecting data from them go much further back. There's a reason young knights were expected to master chess, hold "games" of jousting and fencing, and participate in a number of sports. Before that were wrestling matches, javelin throws, and on and on. They were training for strategy, testing equipment, and building strength. People learned not just from participation but by watching.
There's a reason why military recruiters ask if recruits participated in team sports, Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, have gone hunting, know how to drive, and what kind of grades they got in school. These are indicators of battle readiness since these skills translate directly to being able to fight.
Now we add "with the internet" to this so now it's something new? It's not, people have been doing military strategy games on the internet for a long time now. Not even adding real world hardware and physics to the gaming is all that new. This is a natural evolution, that's all.
But because of the program's unique concurrency strategy, in which deliveries of aircraft started years before the design was finalized, 187 of the aircraft will never be capable of combat operations -- not unless they're sent back to the factory and re-manufactured.
The Air Force needs pilots. They have a shortage of jet aircraft for training new pilots.The Air Force knows that even a airplane that is incapable of going to combat is useful for training. They've had enough delays in getting aircraft for training pilots and they cannot afford more. https://www.dodbuzz.com/2017/1...
I doubt the Air Force cares all that much if these air frames cannot fight, they'll still need them to train pilots while the development continues. When new ones, that are able to fight, come out of the factory the Air Force knows that they'll have pilots that can fly them in combat. I'm certain these new F-35 pilots will need some "refresher" training with the new fully capable aircraft but that's going to be much better training they'd have than if they flew aging T-38 aircraft, or even the F-15, beforehand.
I tried looking up how many training fighters the USAF keeps on hand and I only got estimates. Best I can tell a fighter training wing has over 50 fighters to train with. Best I can tell the USAF has three fighter training wings, with only one that currently has F-35 aircraft. The other two train on the F-16 and F-15. So, if we assume that the USAF is going to transfer all three current training wings from F-16 and F-15 to F-35 in the coming years, and each needs 60 aircraft, then that's 180 training F-35 aircraft that they need. So, we see 187 non-combat ready air frames? I think I just found a place where the USAF can use those 187 F-35 air frames.
One article said something about a potential of many more F-35 air frames being not up to combat specifications, as many as 900. Well, that could be a problem. If the number of non-combat F-35 air frames is as much as 300 then that likely fills any needs the USAF needs for training and testing. Should it get much higher then the USAF will have to do something more than just hold them back for non-combat roles. But, I've noticed something about USAF air frames in the past. We'll see "blocks" of aircraft with slightly differing hardware and software that separate them from earlier aircraft. We'll also see aircraft get a new letter designation from being upgraded, such as F-14A variants getting upgrades to F-14B specifications. I can understand why the UASF might delay upgrading these air frames, they can fly them as trainers now and when new upgrades are developed they can bring them in to get what is new in 15 or 20 years, like the F-14, instead of what comes out today. Even if the numbers of non-combat F-35 air frames number in the hundreds, when the total number planned for production is in the thousands, there is still a lot of room to shuffle these non-combat air frames around as trainers, spares, testing, and so forth, for years before sending them back for upgrades to combat readiness. At that point they'd be upgraded to what's current then, not what's current now.
Seeing as any aircraft, military or not, will typically go back to the manufacturer periodically anyway for maintenance they can get the maintenance and any upgrades they deem necessary at the same time.
Oh, another thing I saw as a common practice in the USAF, is taking "totaled" air frames and using what parts they can as spares. In the unfortunate, but likely, event of a future F-35 crashes then the parts can be used to upgrade a current "trainer" F-35 to combat specifications.
Without repair capabilities, availability for actual combat is probably zero; but it's probably zero anyway until the software improves.
If they plan to have 3000+ flying by 2035 as I read elsewhere then that means they plan on making somethin
Something is keeping these stealth variants of current air frames from being deployed, and I'm curious to know what that is.
Because there is a huge amount of equipment packed into a bunch of small spaces. If you wanted to build a stealth trainer on an old airframe, sure. If you wanted to build a stealth version of the A-10 that is big and slow and uses a lot of fuel, you could do that too. If you want a high performance fighter aircraft, you're going to have to redesign it because what is good for aerodynamics is not the same as what is good for stealth and you just have to build the thing with a significantly different body type and balance. Even if it looks similar on the outside at the end.
There's been development of stealth versions of the F-15 and F-18 already. It seems not all the components needed to make a stealth version of these planes have been all put together and tested as a unit yet because of costs. There's a short bit on the F-15 and F-18 stealth development on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Because the F-15 and F-18 were well designed from the start, and have large electronics bays for the technology of the time there is a lot of room for improvement with little effort compared to starting over. Considering the troubles that the F-35 has had, and the superb past performance of the F-15 and F-18, it would seem that one could get something very competitive with the F-35 out of updated versions of the F-15 and F-18. Claims of 50% reduction of frontal radar cross section from improved tail fins, radar absorbing materials, and conforming weapons bays, seem pretty amazing and achievable. New fuel efficient engines claim they can increase speed and maneuverability while also increasing range.
Also, the blah-blah you read on the interwebs about the F-35, it is just a fad to be a hater. People in the military who listen to the BS hater stuff, they change their tune the first time they come out of a classified briefing on the program. Every time.
It would be nice to have these people speak up then. I've heard from people in the industry that the claims of failure from the F-35 to be an actual improvement over previous generation fighters are true. The F-35 is trying to be all things to everyone and therefore looks like anything else designed by committee. It's a dog fighter that can't turn, a tank killer that lacks a punch, and just all kinds of fail. When put up against current fighters, some F-18 variant as I recall, it failed miserably. The excuse (for lack of a better word) for the failure was that the radar defeating paint, new electronics, and high output engine was not yet installed. To me that just says they forgot lessons learned long ago that a dogfighter aircraft needs to first be able to dogfight. We cannot rely on the fancy paint and electronics because the enemy might be able to defeat those in time and it will come down to being able to turn, climb, and shoot.
If you don't know enough about the technology to understand that all of it is late generation stuff that has undergone numerous iterations, then why ask for updating of existing technology? Not all types of machine have can have their fundamental design changed after construction, but that doesn't mean that building a new one isn't an act of updating the existing technology.
I simply cannot say everything I know, but I'm certain that the F-35 is a failure. Perhaps future variants might polish this turd. We've been able to keep many aircraft flying far beyond their intended life because we've figured out ways to improve what we have rather than starting over, but we need something good from the start to work with. We've also seen aircraft see a very short o
The Army is not allowed to have fixed wing aircraft.
The US Army has lots of fixed wing aircraft, more than 200 if my math and a few sources I found on the internet are correct. They have close to 200 just in fixed wing cargo planes. There's a few dozen jets for VIP transport, medical evacuation, and other roles. There are 100 or so aircraft for intelligence, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and similar roles. None with weapons though.
That's why the Air Force exists.
The Air Force exists for more things than flying over the Army and bringing them MREs and mail.
The Marines can't fly a plane that won't fit on a carrier.
They fly lots of things that won't fit on a carrier. Much like the Army they fly aircraft for cargo, transport (medical, troop, VIP), recon/e-warfare, and such. The C-130 variants (tankers, cargo, utility, and special operations) that the USMC flies did have some experiments with carrier operations but that is far from common practice. They even maintain some combat capable fighters that cannot land on a carrier, admittedly for training only.
So if the Air Force did offer the A-10, they already knew neither service could field the plane anyway.
There was an agreement long ago that the Army would have no aircraft at all, then the agreement was changed to allow non-combat airplanes and helicopters in all roles. There's nothing that really keeps this agreement from changing again to allow the Army to fly subsonic, short range, close air support, fixed wing aircraft. Such a transfer would no doubt have resistance but it appears the Air Force has been trying to rid itself of the A-10 for a long time now.
The USMC already maintains a fleet of fixed wing aircraft, including those that cannot fit on a carrier. They might be best equipped to take the aircraft if not for the size of the A-10 fleet. A quick Google search tells me over 700 A-10 air frames were built and somewhere between 150 and 300 remain in service (I got conflicting numbers but it's somewhere in there). The USMC flies about 1000 aircraft, as best I can tell, and adding another 300 to that would likely strain their budget and staffing. I'd assume a lot of Air Force people would transfer over with the aircraft but the budget would have to transfer too or it's not happening.
Reading some old news on this today from searching the internet and I saw some reports of the Army wanting to take the A-10 and some where it did not. No doubt this has a lot to do with who is in charge over time. It would be VERY interesting if the Army started to fly combat fixed wing aircraft. I suspect that in time it may just happen, though not necessarily any time soon or with the A-10. Only because air assets are becoming increasingly vital and the Air Force has been preoccupied with many things other than protecting Army tanks.
We have the US military buying a few dozen, perhaps even a couple hundred, of aircraft that are hobbled with early development troubles because of concurrent testing and production. Let's assume what might be worst case situation of 300 early air frames crippled by being effectively prototypes of the final product.
A quick look at current plans for the F-35 and I see the USAF has ordered nearly 2000 on it's own. The Navy and Marines combined has ordered more than 500, and likely to order many more in the future. Then there are the many US allies buying them by the dozens, and perhaps hundreds. Just right now, today, there is an expectation of over 3000 being built. Taking my worst case of 300 early air frames being "very expensive trainers" since they would not meet combat specifications does not appear to be much of a problem.
A new fighter pilot will go through a number of air frames on their way to flying the operational fighters like the F-35. They'll start out on something real simple and cheap, like a common single engine Cessna. A more well funded air force might skip the Cessna and move directly to a single engine propeller trainer like a Texan II. Some pilots might even stop right there as the Texan II is a very nice light duty fighter and recon plane but we'll assume that the pilots still move on to something more advanced. This will almost always be a two seat jet, often a retired fighter or special purpose trainer. At this point the F-35 might even fill in if the powers that be want to do a trainer conversion for these "unworthy" air frames. Once the pilot is past the phase of needing someone in the back seat then they move on to the "real" planes they will be flying. This is where the early production F-35 air frames are likely to end up. This role alone could eat up all, or at least most, of these early F-35 air frames. The people in these aircraft don't need them to be combat worthy. If there are restrictions on the air frames, like weapon and fuel load, then the difference between this kind of trainer and combat worthy air frames will be a non-issue. Again, the USAF is buying up 2000 F-35 air frames, and the US Navy and Marines will buy another 500 or more. The training squadrons in the USAF and USN/USMC will need dozens of "very expensive trainers" for their pilots.
It's not like these aircraft are "worthless". They are likely to end up as trainers, test platforms, spare parts, and (if things really get bad) they can be quickly fitted out for combat with a reduced performance over main production F-35 air frames.
I'm old enough to remember the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The kind of fighting the airplanes flying over there don't need quality. I do remember quantity being an issue. These planes where flying often on bombing runs in uncontested air space. There was nothing, or next to nothing, to oppose them. The military got so used to these bomb runs on second and third tier air frames that they got to be called "bomb trucks". It was about as exciting as delivering the mail. It was always on time and to the correct address, much like any competent postal service, but it doesn't take anything real fancy to deliver the mail. They had to use these older air frames because maintaining such a pace became problematic for even the latest and greatest of aircraft. They didn't have the time to change the oil and pump up the tires so they pulled some older aircraft out of mothballs.
In the grand scheme of things even a few hundred out of the thousands of these F-35 air frames being non-combat capable does not appear to be a problem. While the testing and development continues on the F-35 we can see functional aircraft to train pilots with, and spare aircraft available if an all out war breaks out, among other advantages. If the F-35 meets it's promise of being the replacement for the F-16, F-18, A-10, and other aircraft then we'll need close to 10,000 of these. The few dozen or even a few hundred "worthless" air frames start to look like a non-issue at that point, especially since they are certainly not "worthless".
I was not impressed with the video. I saw a lot of lighting off of flares, pretty standard maneuvering for a fighter aircraft, and some "cute" air show moves that have very little utility in an actual dogfight.
Granted, I am not a pilot, certainly not a military pilot, so I can give only an assessment based on what most any enthusiast of military hardware would likely know. A quick review of the SU-30 specs does show some very impressive capability, such as a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1. Getting a thrust to weigh ratio over 1 means being able to climb straight up, presumably where no adversary could go. The F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon can also go completely vertical, so this is not as an impressive capability as it was a decade or so ago.
Unless I can see more then I'm not going to be impressed with what looks like some fourth generation upgrades to a third generation air frame, in a world now dominated by fifth generation fighters. That said, the F-35 is also (effectively) a third generation fighter but with fifth generation upgrades bolted on, giving us something that was built to outclass the best of fourth generation air frames that the US adversaries had... and largely failed.
The US DOD has been penny wise and pound foolish thinking that they could build a new all role fighter by consolidating development into a triplet of closely related air frames. They should have gone with building three air frames and expected to make up on the development costs with volume. There's plans to build over 2000 of these F-35 air frames, likely 5000 before the last one rolls out and all production stops. That's more than enough to cover any duplication of effort if the development didn't require trying to shoehorn an F-16, A-10, and AV-8 into one product.
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Not to mention, very few people want to eat a meal every 2 hours (150 miles / 75 mph).
Who can average 75 mph for two hours? Where you driving, Nebraska? I was thinking of more like 3 hours, 180 miles @ 60 mph. Breakfast at about 8 or 9 AM, stop about noon to eat lunch. At 3 or 4 PM stop for ice cream, a coffee and a donut, or other kind of snack. Then stop for supper about 6 or 7 PM. If this isn't the destination and one is willing then this can mean another couple hours before stopping to find a place to sleep for the night to repeat same the next day.
Watching a sitcom on a streaming service during charging breaks would become a thing (Netflix & Charge?).
If the charging station has a nice lounge and a solid WiFi system then this might be something people actually do. If they have to sit in their car and use up precious cell phone data then not so much.
A better solution which only works if people could be trusted around high voltages - overhead lines over one roadway lane, and a pantograph to reach it, so you can drive and charge (sortof like trackless trolleys). Just remember to drop the pan before exiting the lane.
How well will that work at 75 mph on an interstate through Nebraska? I can't imagine anyone slowing down for that unless they really really have to, they are driving through Nebraska you know. Then again, if it saves them from actually having to stop in Nebraska, then I could see that.
As an undergrad I also knew someone that made fake IDs. Very convincing ones too, especially since the guy had got his hands on the state ID laminates with the watermark on them. I recall he said that he bought them off someone that stole them from a DMV office. I didn't want to ask any questions, the less I knew the better. He said he'd make me one with the clear laminate for free but if I wanted the laminate with the state watermark that I'd have to pay for that. Most people don't think to look for the watermark, or so he claimed.
He was smart enough to keep this to word of mouth, especially since he knew he had a limited number of laminates to sell.
You know how it turned out.
$50 fine and time served?
I remember hearing something like that before... That's right in the movie Grosse Pointe Blank.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
Debi: [about the man Martin killed at the reunion] He was trying to kill you, right?
Marty: Yes.
Debi: It wasn't the other way around?
Marty: No.
Debi: Is it something you've done?
Marty: It's something I do... professionally, for about five years now.
[He lifts the gun in his hand]
Debi: [Gasps] You were joking! People joke about the horrible things they *don't* do, they don't *do* them! It's absurd!
Marty: When I left, I joined the Army, and when I took the service exam, my psych profile fit a certain... "moral flexibility" would be the only way to describe it. I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program and we sort of found each other. That's the way it works.
Debi: So, you're a government spook?
Marty: Yes, I mean no. I was before but I'm not now... but that' all irrelevant, really. The idea of government, nations is public relations theory at this point.
Debi: Don't. I don't wanna hear about the theories. I wanna hear about the dead people. Explain the dead people.
I remember talking to my dad about one of his card playing buddies. I think it was about me overhearing them talking about him going to college. I asked what was his major, Dad said the guy just went to school to play baseball.
A lot of these student athletes don't think much about what they are going to do after college. They'll study just about anything so they can say they went to college. They go to school so that they can play sports and hope some professional team picks them up, or just to live the high school jock life for 2 or 4 years longer.
If they graduate then at least they can check that box on a job application saying they went to college, even if what they will be doing is answering phones and telling people that call to reboot their modem. Which will be especially odd if they end up working at an ice cream parlor.
It's not like the classes jocks take are difficult either.
Bet he was a communications major.
The article did state that grades were changed in business, engineering and chemistry classes. There may have been grades changed in Earth Science 101: "Rocks for Jocks" too. It sounds like he was selling his services to other students, which is just asking to get caught.
Changing grades on the computer is just stupid, IMHO, since it's not like the instructors don't keep paper records. Had he stuck to copying exams and answer keys then he might have gotten away with it, at least long enough to graduate. Or at least add enough doubt as to who did what when that no one would call the FBI on him. But then people that resort to cheating on exams aren't typically that bright.
What I have to ponder is why the FBI was involved. This was a state facility, not a federal one. Doesn't every state have their own investigation service? As a state university they'll have their own police force, with a direct line to said state investigation office. What federal law was broken? Not that this seems to matter any more, I remember an assault case that made national news. The FBI got involved for some reason. When asked why the FBI was there the answer floored me, the scissors used to cut the victim's hair came from out of state so this was an investigation of "interstate commerce" as defined in the US Constitution. If that's the bar that has to be hurdled then everything is a federal case. Some kid steals a candy bar and the FBI is there because he was wearing shoes made in China.
The university told the FBI that the cheating scheme cost the school $68,000 to investigate the breach and to beef up its IT security.
Maybe they should have thought about IT security from the start.
I've been to college and I see how "security" is done. The computers the instructors use are just put on a desk or table in the front of the room. To keep it from walking away there will be a flimsy cable attaching the parts to the desk or wall. Even basic security, like setting BIOS passwords, will not be done. This can allow spying on the computer with software keyloggers and such, or simply vandalizing it so it's unbootable. The installation of a hardware keylogger, like in this example, takes no real skill.
Newer classrooms will have a proper podium designed to hold a computer. The computer will still just be out in the open for someone to mess with, and being in a podium will make things like a hardware keylogger more difficult to see.
Had the school thought of security from the start then this would not have happened and the costs would have been minimal. For example, when installing the podium use one with a locking door to the space for the computer. This would make installing a keylogger, hardware or software, much more difficult. It would also add some inconvenience for the IT support and the instructors, which is likely why it wasn't considered until something like this happened.
There's a lot of simple things that should have been done on just getting basic physical security on the computers. From what I know the network and software is pretty secure. The software people on universities love to play with this and it costs next to nothing to implement since graduate students' time is effectively free.
Assuming that these computers have some basic physical security, and pretty solid software security, that doesn't stop things like a student sneaking into a classroom early in the morning, before classes start for the day, and putting a cheap cell phone in the ceiling tile so the camera looks down on the keyboard through a small hole, and recording keystrokes.
What I think will solve this problem is the inevitable march of technology. I suspect that computers will get small and powerful enough that instructors will simply bring their computer with them to the classroom. There will be nothing in the room to mess with that would allow keyloggers or whatever. Access to computers in public spaces like labs, libraries, and so forth will be require an actual thought on security instead of technology fixing it for them. I'd think that there's lots of ways that could fix this where graduate students could do some research and development on this, which doesn't require any hardware, and they get to write a paper on it for a grade.
At the start they need basic physical security. They failed on this, and when someone took advantage of this they claim this wasn't the school's fault. No, it was the school's fault. If you own a house but don't lock the door when you leave then don't be surprised if someone walks in to walk off with your spare change jar and the beer in your fridge. Punish the trespasser but own up to leaving the door unlocked.
At highway/motorway speeds, every 150 miles you should take AT LEAST a 20 minute break. That means 450mph recharge is more than enough.
I agree. There's a problem with that though. If I'm on a trip with an EV then I'm stuck watching the car charge for 20 minutes. Unless the place I stop also has a place to eat, and food I'd actually want to eat, then I'm watching the car and then going further down the road to eat.
If I have a gasoline car then I'm filling up in a few minutes and gone to find somewhere to eat. If I have a hybrid then I'm filled up in no time and I still have something that will charge up overnight for my daily commute. If I have a natural gas car then I can fill up at home overnight, and I can still fill up in minutes while on long trips.
If I'm traveling with someone then I can stop every 100 to 200 miles to switch drivers, top off the tank, take a piss, and grab some food to eat on the way. That's just a few minutes, not 20, and no one is driving tired. Can't do that with an electric.
People tend to buy what they need for all occasions. They need something that can be a daily commuter and also be able to take the kids to go visit Grandma once a month or so. When there is a married couple with small children they are not going to want to stop for 20 minutes to recharge the car. They are going to stop, top off the tank, and switch drivers if one is tired. Can't do that with an electric. Maybe they'll have a hybrid so at least the commutes are electric only. Maybe they have two vehicles where during the week he drives the sedan and she drives the minivan, on long trips everyone piles in the one that burns hydrocarbons.
Electric cars have a LONG way to go before they can replace hydrocarbon burning vehicles.
You clearly seem to only want to talk about long trips rather than your everyday life.
No, I was talking about getting the advantage of filling up at home overnight for a daily commute AND still getting the ability to get a quick fill up on long trips. I can do that with natural gas and not have to bother with the complexity and cost of an electric hybrid. If for some reason a person is unable to get natural gas at home, such as people that live outside city limits, they can get an electric hybrid which has the electric range for the daily commute and still have the ability for fast refill on long trips.
There's a reason why, for example, that European commercial drivers are legally required to have at least 45 minutes of breaks for every 4 1/2 hours of driving (split up as they choose) and can lose their license if they don't: it's not safe to drive all day with no or minimal stops.
I'm not a commercial driver. Even then when I go on long trips I tend to not do so alone. We'll switch out drivers so no one is driving tired.
Are you under the mistaken impression that most people with solar installs are off-grid?
No, I was under the assumption that solar energy was supposed to be a major contributor to the electrical grid, as so many people keep telling me is "inevitable". If we assume that 1/3rd of our electricity is from solar, and electric cars are the norm, then we are going to see grid scale batteries being used to charge electric car batteries every night. That's a lot of batteries.
Grid demand is highest during the day, lower at night. If you're providing excess power during the day and consuming more than usual at night, you're helping the grid.
That helps until the wind doesn't blow, since we're having 1/3rd of our electricity from wind power now. This might help the grid but it's not helping the environment. Solar and wind need batteries, adding batteries means adding to the carbon footprint. If we want "green" electric vehicles then we need nuclear power. If you think nuclear power is going to be used to charge up these electric cars at night then perhaps we can agree on more things than we disagree. Lacking nuclear power we see that battery electric vehicles are not any more "green" than using fossil fuels.
It's not. Power plants burn natural gas over twice as efficiently as a NG car (transmission / distribution / battery / motor losses are each minimal), emit much less per unit power, and buy the gas for a lot cheaper than you do at home. Natural gas also is a minority of your power generation (a large minority, but still a minority).
That's assuming that the natural gas is being burned in combined cycle plants. If natural gas is the back up for wind and solar then it will be burned in turbines, which get 1/2 to 1/3 the efficiency of the combined cycle plants. In other words, in the ballpark of how much natural gas would be burned in the NG car compared to having to charge up a BEV car from those backup natural gas plants.
The resources needed to build all these batteries means a HUGE carbon footprint. This is often overlooked on claims of solar power being green. When the claims of solar energy being unreliable is brought up the solution is always batteries but the carbon footprint those batteries have is not added in. Battery backed solar has a carbon footprint no better than natural gas. With natural gas cars we can have slow over night "chargers" at home, and quick fill "chargers" on long trips. The carbon footprint of these natural gas cars is half that of a gasoline burner (some claim as low as 20%), or about the same as a solar powered BEV.
Welcome to late 2017, where global fast charging networks are a thing.
They will never be as fast as fueling from natural gas, gasoline, or diesel fuel. You can make your claims on how this is irrelevant all you like but reality tells me that this is important to people.
I, for one, am not that thrilled with the notion that the Saudi Kingdom is building reactors in the middle east and we are politically hamstrung against advancing the technology here in the U.S. Saudi Arabia may have the outward appearance of stability, but they're not as far removed from constant conflict as it seems.
That list of wars on Wikipedia includes many before the modern nation of Saudi Arabia even existed. I'd think that anything that predates WWII is far enough in the past that it has little relevance on today's political climate. I know that the echoes of the era before 1930 or 1950 influence what happens today but the people fighting before then are dead or senile now. The wars after that were mostly of the kingdom defending itself from outside aggressors. Again, not completely true but for the most part the nation itself is quite peaceful and prosperous.
They are peaceful and prosperous enough that they can expend the resources needed to plan for a future where the oil that they've been using to prop up their economy might not be there any more. They are now working on a transition. They had roughly a century of living off of the fruits of their oil resources. They'll likely enjoy another century of transition until the oil income is so low, and income from other sources so great, that there is not going to be fights over oil any more. There will still be wars, no doubt of that, but future wars are much less likely to be over oil.
Combining the likelihood of improved techniques for recovery with inevitable leaps in the efficiency of the relatively nascent battery technology seems to suggest that current mineral scarcities will be overcome.
I doubt that there will be any more "leaps" in battery technology. We'll probably make them safer and cheaper but I have my doubts on making them carry more energy per weight and volume. We might see energy density double, maybe even get to be as high as ten times what we have now. To get beyond that the battery will need resources outside of the battery for the chemistry, an "air breathing" system or something. Having a battery that requires external resources for the chemistry adds complexity, like the air filters we have on current gasoline burning cars to keep out road dust, and is also pushing the definition of "battery". Needing the fuel and oxidizer in a sealed container puts a hard limit on the chemical energy it can store in a given mass and volume. Extending this energy density with external resources means that any convenience for not having to add fuel to the vehicle is now lost, no more driving past filling stations.
We're going to hit a hard limit on battery energy density real soon now, assuming we haven't hit it already.
What is a nascent technology is nuclear energy. We can squeeze a lot out of that yet once people get motivated to do so. I have to wonder if the kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a plan to continue in the energy business, past the days of oil. I believe it would be very wise for them to plan on making nuclear energy research part of the plan for their future.
When people think that getting 400 miles of range from a vehicle after one hour of charging, and consider this an "improvement", have a mental block on reality. I can "charge" my Ford truck in 5 minutes, and get about 350 miles from that. Places to "charge" are easily found, I drive past probably a dozen of them on my daily commute.
Yes, they take an evening to charge at home, but what does that matter? You take ten seconds to plug in, and then you don't think any more about it; your car is full the next morning.
While last shopping for a vehicle, before ending up with my little SUV, I looked at a natural gas car. They too "charge up" at home overnight. They also take ten seconds to plug in. Where it matters though is that I'd be tied to the range of my car on a single "charge" unless I can find a place to fill up. At least with a natural gas car it too can fill up in five minutes when using the high capacity natural gas filling stations, home service lines for natural gas aren't made for filling cars.
With so much of our electricity from natural gas it seems logical to me to spend the money on getting the best of both worlds from natural gas. If electricity in an area comes from wind, water, or nuclear then maybe a natural gas EV hybrid makes sense. I saw an article recently on battery backed solar and we'd be better off with natural gas as far as CO2 output goes. That and we'd avoid solar energy's sky high electricity prices, and the massive resources needed to build all those collectors and batteries.
Solar charging of electric cars is just plain stupid. People tend to park their cars at night and drive when the sun shines. To accommodate this means charging up a battery during the day and then using this battery at night to charge the battery in the car. If we do something like a battery swap deal then this isn't a simple process of just plugging in your car at home, it's a process of lifting a massive battery from your car at a facility made for such a things, kind of like a filling station. It's because of all this battery production that the CO2 output goes up for battery backed solar. At least with wind backed up with batteries we get some energy day and night, and not just a 6 hour window to gather energy and a peak right when people take a break for lunch.
Elon Musk is a very smart person, and I can only assume he knows what many others do about the viability of electric cars and solar power. I just have to wonder what is his angle on this. I have to guess he's using the money and research from Tesla and SolarCity to get to space, where solar power makes a bit more sense. I doubt he's going to admit to this nonsense publicly, at least not until called out in a way that's undeniable. By that point SpaceX is likely to be successful enough that he won't mind so much to admit to any failure on batteries and electric cars.
She wants a new iPhone, knows nothing about it, but is a Silicon Valley engineer?
You apparently haven't met many engineers. I have. Engineers got where they are by expending a lot of mental energy on a narrow band of knowledge. I've met a lot of electrical and computer engineers that cannot be bothered to learn what I would consider very basic things on how the computers they use every day actually work. Many of these "power users" will have very powerful Linux workstations on their desk but when they go home to surf the web they'll do it on a ten year old Windows computer, an iPad, or avoid computers and simply open a beer and watch football on TV.
What I do means I have to live part of my life in the world of engineers and part in the IT world. I will find myself baffled at the ignorance of an engineer about the computers they use everyday, and at the ignorance of IT staff on how the computers they support work, only to snap out of it and realize that they don't know this stuff because they don't have to.
Engineers will buy into the brand recognition like anyone else. This might be cell phones, cars, sportball teams, clothes, or whatever else they think might matter with their friends.
I also believe that we will not run out of oil any time soon. One reason to believe this is because we are seeing more efficient uses of it worldwide. One example is not burning it for electricity when there are other sources of energy far more suited for it, saving the oil for transportation. Saudi Arabia has learned this.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sau...
Saudi Arabia plans on building more than 17 GW of nuclear energy capacity by 2032. That's roughly 100 MW of nuclear power capacity built per month for a nation, from a nation with roughly 1/10th the population and economic output of the USA. For the USA to do this means 1 GW of nuclear power capacity built per month. If they can do that then we can do that.
The interesting thing about that 1 GW per month calculation is that this is also about the same electrical capacity we'd need to add to keep up with planned closures of current nuclear and coal power plants. That's not adding capacity, that's just (barely) keeping even.
Natural gas is cheap now, which is the primary source of added electrical capacity now in the USA. What happens when natural gas isn't so cheap any more? Are we going to start building nuclear power plants like Saudi Arabia?
I know someone is ready to come back with a reply that we can go to wind and solar for our electricity, and that we can use batteries to make these unreliable energy sources reliable. Then we just get back to the problem pointed out in the article, a shortage of materials for making batteries. What happens when batteries start to get expensive? Are we going to go to nuclear power then?
What materials do we need to build a nuclear power plant? Just about the same materials for coal or natural gas, or about 1/10 the materials needed for the same capacity of wind or solar. If we have the material to build enough wind and solar to meet future energy needs then we have enough material to meet our future energy needs 10 times over with nuclear power.
America won't run out of coal, oil, or natural gas because we will have moved a large part of our energy production to nuclear long before we run out of them. If we don't move to nuclear power then we will be buying oil from a nuclear powered Saudi Arabia, which is just saying we'll be using Saudi Arabian nuclear power to power the American economy. Of all the places on Earth to build solar power I'd think Saudi Arabia would be very high on that list. I'm sure they have been and still will use solar power, but they are jumping in big on nuclear power now. That should be a clue for Americans that think we should avoid nuclear power here.
I suspect at some point we will have hydrogen fuel cells.
What? We already have them. Oh, you mean in cars. That's not happening. Hydrogen is very difficult to store and transport, unless bound chemically to something else. I'll get back to that.
The storage of the hydrogen is likely to be the killer app for carbon nanotech, as we don't want to substitute one waste of metals for another.
The best way we have to store hydrogen now is when bound to something else. Water works well to "store" hydrogen, as in being bound to an oxygen, but that's not much for a fuel. Binding hydrogen to a nitrogen or carbon works well as a fuel though. There's a reason why there is so much research into fuel cells that can run on methane and methanol, it's easier to solve the problem of extracting the hydrogen from these chemicals than to store pure hydrogen. The great thing about storing hydrogen by binding it to a carbon, we've been using hydrogen bound to carbon as fuel for a very long time. If we can make hydrogen cheap enough to use as a fuel then we can bind it to carbon and use it immediately as a fuel, no fuel cells needed.
The hydrogen can be generated in situ at home or the filling station with wind or solar power, so no dangerous tanks like with gasoline.
If you think that handling hydrogen is easier and safer than handling gasoline then I'm staying very far away from you. The hydrogen tanks will not be eliminated, the car has one. The car will need one if the fuel cells are going to propel the car.
Also, if you think that wind and solar is going to work for filling up a car for a daily driver then I suggest you check your math. Someone did do the math and it's not an easy problem to solve.
http://withouthotair.com/
Pity we really kinda suck at recycling.
What? We do just fine at recycling. Imagine this, you have two piles, a pile of old lead-acid batteries and a pile of high grade lead ore. If it takes $1000 to get the lead out of the ore and $2000 to get the lead out of the batteries then where is the incentive to recycle the batteries? I'm assuming the batteries are in a place, jut like the ore, where neither pose health risks to the public where there would need to be anything expended to mitigate things like ground water contamination.
I could argue that the USA recycles far more than makes sense. I had a chemistry professor that in one lecture told the class how recycling plastics was a terrible idea. His argument was that we had a perfectly functional waste burning power plant not far from campus that could burn the plastic for energy rather than ship the plastic to some far off place to try to melt it down into something useful again. Just go make more plastic if we need more plastic, we know how to do that chemistry very well.
Recycling most metals makes perfect sense, that's something that is easy to recycle. Recycling paper and plastics are a bad idea, just burn them for their energy content and go get more. Between those two extremes are things like concrete where sometimes recycling makes sense, sometimes not, or recycling options are limited. Iron and aluminum can almost always be recycled from a high quality product into another high quality product. Concrete, even in the highest quality, is not likely to be recycled into another high quality product. Recycling might mean putting that high quality concrete (such as from a building) in a lower quality product (such as aggregate for a road). Recycling again might mean using it for the road bed, after that it's probably only good for landfill.
High quality paper (books and office paper) might be recycled into a lower quality paper (newsprint), and maybe again into a lower quality paper (insulation), and after that it's only good for burning or burying. I have to wonder if paper recycling makes sense at all after taking a tour of a paper recycling plant. The guy giving the tour mentioned the difficulty in separating the paper from all the junk that comes with it. He didn't say it outright but I got the impression that it was something they did only because if they did not they'd have people with torches and pitchforks outside chanting, "Reduce! Recycle! Reuse!"
I've learned that we are not only very good at recycling but we recycle more than we should. Dump the stuff in a landfill, if it makes sense to recycle it then we know where to find it.
Oh, one last thing. I was helping my brother with a plumbing project (he was a plumber and I was a college student on break in need of cash) and when we were done we had more than 200 pounds of cast iron pipe that we tore out of the house we worked on. I called a local recycle center on what they'd pay us for it. After I got off the phone my brother said we were taking the iron to the land fill. Even taking in the landfill fees into account it cost us less to landfill the pipe than to drive the iron to get recycled. If you think that iron needs to be recycled then I'll you where to find it.
Is the problem helped by using higher grade HDMI cables?
That's possible. It's been a while since I looked into this so my memory is foggy. The problem may have been in the converter box and/or a poor connection between the box and cable from not being seated correctly or differing opinions on the HDMI plug and port specifications. It's pretty common now to need a DisplayPort, DVI, or USB converter box to get HDMI any more. These boxes are often plastic, which won't contain RFI like the metal case of a laptop.
I hate these converter boxes, they cost just as much as a conversion cable (and then still requires a cable), they add a lump in the middle of the cord, and just generally add clutter. I wasn't the one with purchase authority, and no one thought to ask me what I thought would have been a better use of resources before buying them. I think a converter cable, rather than a converter box and cable, could have solved the problem. Partly because the conversion is done much closer to the HDMI destination (meaning much less length of cable carrying the HDMI signal and it is further from the computer), the cable avoids the need of a break in the wire (as the additional connector in the middle of the chain can be a leakage point), and again just better shielding along the entire path.
You've never seen the back of a receiver or TV in the past... what, fifteen years, and went straight from red/white analog cables to an hdmi receiver?
I've seen the back of a lot of stereo receivers, TV sets, and other home theater electronics, in the last 15 years or so and none had an optical audio input, at least none that I can recall. I've seen outputs, lots of outputs. I just saw no inputs. I've also noticed a lot of copper digital audio outputs but rarely an input to go with. What was maddening was to see a copper input and an optical output when hooking up an A/V system. I would have liked to use the digital link but I wasn't about to bother with some adapter when the analog lines worked.
Maybe I did blink and miss the whole thing. If I go looking now will I find optical inputs or has everyone moved on to HDMI audio now?
Also why bother with cables at all?
Because the brain dead HDMI spec likes to shit all over the Wi-Fi bands. They picked the "perfect" combination of leaky signal lines and clock rates to create RF noise that lands in the two primary ISM bands for WiFi. You might think this would not affect you since you run no HDMI lines to the TV but these TVs fitted out with integrated streaming boxes like to run HDMI internally. It's quite likely, even on a TV that one would think was tested against such things, will have certain screen resolutions that will jam it's own WiFi.
I heard people complain of WiFi failing on laptops when connected to some displays and only some of the time. It took some research to find out that the harmonics from HDMI would sit inside the WiFi bands. If you hit the right combination of variables then WiFi fails.
So, it looks like people get to choose, HDMI or WiFi, because it's unlikely you can have both.
I don't know if HDMI likes to shit on Bluetooth too but I would not be surprised if it did since it shares frequencies with WiFi.
That's just my theory, and I haven't tested the theory much yet, so I won't be terribly upset if someone can show I'm full of it.
Right so how does one use HDMI for my audio given the video signal never actually leaves the TV? I don't think the TV even has an HDMI out because why would it?
As sibling post point out the audio output from HDMI is on one of the HDMI inputs, called the Audio Return Channel (or ARC) input. This allows a stereo receiver, sound bar, or whatever, to get the audio from the HMDI on what appears to be only a one-way input port.
Why would anyone need HDMI for audio? Consider your setup, a feature filled TV with tuner and streaming device built in. Now imaging adding a stereo receiver that provides switching between audio/video sources like a DVD player, satellite box, and game console. The stereo would strip out the audio from the HDMI for the other A/V sources but if you want to hear the TV through the stereo speakers then the audio is sent out to the stereo through the HDMI/ARC "input" port. This means not having to run two cables (one for A/V input and another for audio only output) between the stereo and TV.
Oh and a 2 metre Toshlink cable on eBay can be had for less than the price of a coffee.
Yes, Toslink cables are cheap but then so are HDMI cables. I did a quick look on the internet and I see Toslink and HDMI cables both for $8 or so. I don't know what you pay for a coffee so maybe the Toslink is indeed cheaper than HDMI, but it seems only marginally so. One thing though, if you've already run the HDMI to get video in then you can save enough for another cup of coffee by not needing the Toslink for audio by using HDMI/ARC.
HDMI also has an Ethernet channel to get a network between devices, for things like sharing an internet link with a game console. HDMI carries some power too, not much perhaps. The power it provides is 0.25W, 4.5W, or 7.5W depending on the standards the device supports on a given HDMI port. Even if you don't use the video over the HDMI cable, or the power, or Ethernet, the combination of ARC and CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) means even a simple soundbar has not just audio from the TV but also control signals.
You said the TV is made by LG, it likely has has CEC but they call it SimpLink. If you see SimpLink written on the TV, in the manual, or on the TV menus, then it can very likely send and receive CEC on any HDMI "input".
I've had probably a dozen devices with an optical output, laptops, CD players, DVD players, music streaming boxes, and I'm probably forgetting something. What was rare was anything with an optical audio input, or it seems that way to me. The only thing I can recall having an optical input was this fancy (for the time) SoundBlaster card I bought as part of a computer system from my brother.
I've also had a lot of things with S/PDIF copper inputs and outputs but I don't recall ever having a situation where I actually used them. Most cases for using audio cables from a device to another is connecting an audio source directly to an amplifier. I've had hi-fi stereo systems in the past but the lack of anything with digital inputs meant all those things with digital outputs would be connected with the analog outputs to the pre-amp.
I guess I would have used the optical cables if there were more products that had optical inputs. I suppose I didn't really look all that hard for them but then if all these devices had optical outputs then someone was using them, right? No one I knew used them, but then that's not something that comes up in conversation often.
Now we have digital audio over HDMI, USB, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and more. These cables do more than carry audio too, such as video, power, and remote control signals. I liked the idea of optical audio because it gives a digital signal and keeps electrical isolation, but it never seemed to get off the ground for me.
Optical audio only seems to come up for me when I have a poorly configured Linux audio driver that turns on an optical output, I notice a red dot on a wall, and it takes a minute to realize where it's coming from. I then think for a second on how it might be nice to use that digital audio for something, and then remember I don't have anything with an optical input, and forget about it again.
Is optical audio dying? I have to ask, was it ever alive?
Hey, 1990 called and wants their headline back.
Battle simulations and collecting data from them go much further back. There's a reason young knights were expected to master chess, hold "games" of jousting and fencing, and participate in a number of sports. Before that were wrestling matches, javelin throws, and on and on. They were training for strategy, testing equipment, and building strength. People learned not just from participation but by watching.
There's a reason why military recruiters ask if recruits participated in team sports, Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, have gone hunting, know how to drive, and what kind of grades they got in school. These are indicators of battle readiness since these skills translate directly to being able to fight.
Now we add "with the internet" to this so now it's something new? It's not, people have been doing military strategy games on the internet for a long time now. Not even adding real world hardware and physics to the gaming is all that new. This is a natural evolution, that's all.
But because of the program's unique concurrency strategy, in which deliveries of aircraft started years before the design was finalized, 187 of the aircraft will never be capable of combat operations -- not unless they're sent back to the factory and re-manufactured.
The Air Force needs pilots. They have a shortage of jet aircraft for training new pilots.The Air Force knows that even a airplane that is incapable of going to combat is useful for training. They've had enough delays in getting aircraft for training pilots and they cannot afford more.
https://www.dodbuzz.com/2017/1...
I doubt the Air Force cares all that much if these air frames cannot fight, they'll still need them to train pilots while the development continues. When new ones, that are able to fight, come out of the factory the Air Force knows that they'll have pilots that can fly them in combat. I'm certain these new F-35 pilots will need some "refresher" training with the new fully capable aircraft but that's going to be much better training they'd have than if they flew aging T-38 aircraft, or even the F-15, beforehand.
I tried looking up how many training fighters the USAF keeps on hand and I only got estimates. Best I can tell a fighter training wing has over 50 fighters to train with. Best I can tell the USAF has three fighter training wings, with only one that currently has F-35 aircraft. The other two train on the F-16 and F-15. So, if we assume that the USAF is going to transfer all three current training wings from F-16 and F-15 to F-35 in the coming years, and each needs 60 aircraft, then that's 180 training F-35 aircraft that they need. So, we see 187 non-combat ready air frames? I think I just found a place where the USAF can use those 187 F-35 air frames.
One article said something about a potential of many more F-35 air frames being not up to combat specifications, as many as 900. Well, that could be a problem. If the number of non-combat F-35 air frames is as much as 300 then that likely fills any needs the USAF needs for training and testing. Should it get much higher then the USAF will have to do something more than just hold them back for non-combat roles. But, I've noticed something about USAF air frames in the past. We'll see "blocks" of aircraft with slightly differing hardware and software that separate them from earlier aircraft. We'll also see aircraft get a new letter designation from being upgraded, such as F-14A variants getting upgrades to F-14B specifications. I can understand why the UASF might delay upgrading these air frames, they can fly them as trainers now and when new upgrades are developed they can bring them in to get what is new in 15 or 20 years, like the F-14, instead of what comes out today. Even if the numbers of non-combat F-35 air frames number in the hundreds, when the total number planned for production is in the thousands, there is still a lot of room to shuffle these non-combat air frames around as trainers, spares, testing, and so forth, for years before sending them back for upgrades to combat readiness. At that point they'd be upgraded to what's current then, not what's current now.
Seeing as any aircraft, military or not, will typically go back to the manufacturer periodically anyway for maintenance they can get the maintenance and any upgrades they deem necessary at the same time.
Oh, another thing I saw as a common practice in the USAF, is taking "totaled" air frames and using what parts they can as spares. In the unfortunate, but likely, event of a future F-35 crashes then the parts can be used to upgrade a current "trainer" F-35 to combat specifications.
Without repair capabilities, availability for actual combat is probably zero; but it's probably zero anyway until the software improves.
If they plan to have 3000+ flying by 2035 as I read elsewhere then that means they plan on making somethin
Something is keeping these stealth variants of current air frames from being deployed, and I'm curious to know what that is.
Because there is a huge amount of equipment packed into a bunch of small spaces. If you wanted to build a stealth trainer on an old airframe, sure. If you wanted to build a stealth version of the A-10 that is big and slow and uses a lot of fuel, you could do that too. If you want a high performance fighter aircraft, you're going to have to redesign it because what is good for aerodynamics is not the same as what is good for stealth and you just have to build the thing with a significantly different body type and balance. Even if it looks similar on the outside at the end.
There's been development of stealth versions of the F-15 and F-18 already. It seems not all the components needed to make a stealth version of these planes have been all put together and tested as a unit yet because of costs. There's a short bit on the F-15 and F-18 stealth development on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Because the F-15 and F-18 were well designed from the start, and have large electronics bays for the technology of the time there is a lot of room for improvement with little effort compared to starting over. Considering the troubles that the F-35 has had, and the superb past performance of the F-15 and F-18, it would seem that one could get something very competitive with the F-35 out of updated versions of the F-15 and F-18. Claims of 50% reduction of frontal radar cross section from improved tail fins, radar absorbing materials, and conforming weapons bays, seem pretty amazing and achievable. New fuel efficient engines claim they can increase speed and maneuverability while also increasing range.
Also, the blah-blah you read on the interwebs about the F-35, it is just a fad to be a hater. People in the military who listen to the BS hater stuff, they change their tune the first time they come out of a classified briefing on the program. Every time.
It would be nice to have these people speak up then. I've heard from people in the industry that the claims of failure from the F-35 to be an actual improvement over previous generation fighters are true. The F-35 is trying to be all things to everyone and therefore looks like anything else designed by committee. It's a dog fighter that can't turn, a tank killer that lacks a punch, and just all kinds of fail. When put up against current fighters, some F-18 variant as I recall, it failed miserably. The excuse (for lack of a better word) for the failure was that the radar defeating paint, new electronics, and high output engine was not yet installed. To me that just says they forgot lessons learned long ago that a dogfighter aircraft needs to first be able to dogfight. We cannot rely on the fancy paint and electronics because the enemy might be able to defeat those in time and it will come down to being able to turn, climb, and shoot.
If you don't know enough about the technology to understand that all of it is late generation stuff that has undergone numerous iterations, then why ask for updating of existing technology? Not all types of machine have can have their fundamental design changed after construction, but that doesn't mean that building a new one isn't an act of updating the existing technology.
I simply cannot say everything I know, but I'm certain that the F-35 is a failure. Perhaps future variants might polish this turd. We've been able to keep many aircraft flying far beyond their intended life because we've figured out ways to improve what we have rather than starting over, but we need something good from the start to work with. We've also seen aircraft see a very short o
The Army is not allowed to have fixed wing aircraft.
The US Army has lots of fixed wing aircraft, more than 200 if my math and a few sources I found on the internet are correct. They have close to 200 just in fixed wing cargo planes. There's a few dozen jets for VIP transport, medical evacuation, and other roles. There are 100 or so aircraft for intelligence, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and similar roles. None with weapons though.
That's why the Air Force exists.
The Air Force exists for more things than flying over the Army and bringing them MREs and mail.
The Marines can't fly a plane that won't fit on a carrier.
They fly lots of things that won't fit on a carrier. Much like the Army they fly aircraft for cargo, transport (medical, troop, VIP), recon/e-warfare, and such. The C-130 variants (tankers, cargo, utility, and special operations) that the USMC flies did have some experiments with carrier operations but that is far from common practice. They even maintain some combat capable fighters that cannot land on a carrier, admittedly for training only.
So if the Air Force did offer the A-10, they already knew neither service could field the plane anyway.
There was an agreement long ago that the Army would have no aircraft at all, then the agreement was changed to allow non-combat airplanes and helicopters in all roles. There's nothing that really keeps this agreement from changing again to allow the Army to fly subsonic, short range, close air support, fixed wing aircraft. Such a transfer would no doubt have resistance but it appears the Air Force has been trying to rid itself of the A-10 for a long time now.
The USMC already maintains a fleet of fixed wing aircraft, including those that cannot fit on a carrier. They might be best equipped to take the aircraft if not for the size of the A-10 fleet. A quick Google search tells me over 700 A-10 air frames were built and somewhere between 150 and 300 remain in service (I got conflicting numbers but it's somewhere in there). The USMC flies about 1000 aircraft, as best I can tell, and adding another 300 to that would likely strain their budget and staffing. I'd assume a lot of Air Force people would transfer over with the aircraft but the budget would have to transfer too or it's not happening.
Reading some old news on this today from searching the internet and I saw some reports of the Army wanting to take the A-10 and some where it did not. No doubt this has a lot to do with who is in charge over time. It would be VERY interesting if the Army started to fly combat fixed wing aircraft. I suspect that in time it may just happen, though not necessarily any time soon or with the A-10. Only because air assets are becoming increasingly vital and the Air Force has been preoccupied with many things other than protecting Army tanks.
We have the US military buying a few dozen, perhaps even a couple hundred, of aircraft that are hobbled with early development troubles because of concurrent testing and production. Let's assume what might be worst case situation of 300 early air frames crippled by being effectively prototypes of the final product.
A quick look at current plans for the F-35 and I see the USAF has ordered nearly 2000 on it's own. The Navy and Marines combined has ordered more than 500, and likely to order many more in the future. Then there are the many US allies buying them by the dozens, and perhaps hundreds. Just right now, today, there is an expectation of over 3000 being built. Taking my worst case of 300 early air frames being "very expensive trainers" since they would not meet combat specifications does not appear to be much of a problem.
A new fighter pilot will go through a number of air frames on their way to flying the operational fighters like the F-35. They'll start out on something real simple and cheap, like a common single engine Cessna. A more well funded air force might skip the Cessna and move directly to a single engine propeller trainer like a Texan II. Some pilots might even stop right there as the Texan II is a very nice light duty fighter and recon plane but we'll assume that the pilots still move on to something more advanced. This will almost always be a two seat jet, often a retired fighter or special purpose trainer. At this point the F-35 might even fill in if the powers that be want to do a trainer conversion for these "unworthy" air frames. Once the pilot is past the phase of needing someone in the back seat then they move on to the "real" planes they will be flying. This is where the early production F-35 air frames are likely to end up. This role alone could eat up all, or at least most, of these early F-35 air frames. The people in these aircraft don't need them to be combat worthy. If there are restrictions on the air frames, like weapon and fuel load, then the difference between this kind of trainer and combat worthy air frames will be a non-issue. Again, the USAF is buying up 2000 F-35 air frames, and the US Navy and Marines will buy another 500 or more. The training squadrons in the USAF and USN/USMC will need dozens of "very expensive trainers" for their pilots.
It's not like these aircraft are "worthless". They are likely to end up as trainers, test platforms, spare parts, and (if things really get bad) they can be quickly fitted out for combat with a reduced performance over main production F-35 air frames.
I'm old enough to remember the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The kind of fighting the airplanes flying over there don't need quality. I do remember quantity being an issue. These planes where flying often on bombing runs in uncontested air space. There was nothing, or next to nothing, to oppose them. The military got so used to these bomb runs on second and third tier air frames that they got to be called "bomb trucks". It was about as exciting as delivering the mail. It was always on time and to the correct address, much like any competent postal service, but it doesn't take anything real fancy to deliver the mail. They had to use these older air frames because maintaining such a pace became problematic for even the latest and greatest of aircraft. They didn't have the time to change the oil and pump up the tires so they pulled some older aircraft out of mothballs.
In the grand scheme of things even a few hundred out of the thousands of these F-35 air frames being non-combat capable does not appear to be a problem. While the testing and development continues on the F-35 we can see functional aircraft to train pilots with, and spare aircraft available if an all out war breaks out, among other advantages. If the F-35 meets it's promise of being the replacement for the F-16, F-18, A-10, and other aircraft then we'll need close to 10,000 of these. The few dozen or even a few hundred "worthless" air frames start to look like a non-issue at that point, especially since they are certainly not "worthless".
I was not impressed with the video. I saw a lot of lighting off of flares, pretty standard maneuvering for a fighter aircraft, and some "cute" air show moves that have very little utility in an actual dogfight.
Granted, I am not a pilot, certainly not a military pilot, so I can give only an assessment based on what most any enthusiast of military hardware would likely know. A quick review of the SU-30 specs does show some very impressive capability, such as a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1. Getting a thrust to weigh ratio over 1 means being able to climb straight up, presumably where no adversary could go. The F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon can also go completely vertical, so this is not as an impressive capability as it was a decade or so ago.
Unless I can see more then I'm not going to be impressed with what looks like some fourth generation upgrades to a third generation air frame, in a world now dominated by fifth generation fighters. That said, the F-35 is also (effectively) a third generation fighter but with fifth generation upgrades bolted on, giving us something that was built to outclass the best of fourth generation air frames that the US adversaries had... and largely failed.
The US DOD has been penny wise and pound foolish thinking that they could build a new all role fighter by consolidating development into a triplet of closely related air frames. They should have gone with building three air frames and expected to make up on the development costs with volume. There's plans to build over 2000 of these F-35 air frames, likely 5000 before the last one rolls out and all production stops. That's more than enough to cover any duplication of effort if the development didn't require trying to shoehorn an F-16, A-10, and AV-8 into one product.